Friday, May 11, 2007

When I started posting on this blog some folks whom I shared this with started asking me .. "so what is your take on CRM 2.0?" Are you just going the "i" and "e" way of early 2000 and appending "2.0" to your blog name as the latest fad to get more visibility and ultimately more visitors.

So today I've decided to write this post on what CRM 2.0 means to me.

CRM to me is a set of business process that organizations can apply to ultimately increase shareholder value. I use the term shareholder in the broadest possible way because CRM is applicable to all organizations like one person proprietorship's to non-Profits to SMB's to large mega-corporations. Now its 2.0 time in the CRM world because there is a sustained resurgence of CRM initiatives over the last 2-3 years and its semi-woven into Web 2.0 technologies and concepts like social media, networking through the web, community participation, experience management, captive attention, Wiki's and YouTubes of the world. In CRM 2.0 the most critical concept that changed atleast from my perspective is not the technology, but the realization that there is a "C" in CRM and it stands for the customer, who should be the center of the CRM universe.

Somehow that simple message got lost and it was so CRM 1.0 for organizations to equip themselves with all the CRM technologies and solutions horizontal, vertical, on-premise, hosted, hybrid what not and then try to engage the customer as a drive by target.